The Queen's Mary: In the Shadows of Power...

by Sarah Gristwood

  Now it occurred to her that the hardest thing might be to unlearn that lesson. That those courtiers who could endure their role the longest might be those who could learn to assume a mask – and then put it aside.

  *

  Sometimes Seton helped in the still room, or even in the kitchen, when Isobel had gone down to supervise the preparation of a sturgeon against the great Easter feast day, and make sure her Scottish cook had left the fish heads peeking out of the stargazy pie, not buried them all beneath their sea of pastry.

  Salmon cream, and almond blancmange with shredded pike. No meat, of course, during Lent; but guiltily they confessed to each other how they longed for a joint of veal cooked gently in white wine, for a rich stew of venison with rosemary and currants in it.

  Seton laughed at Isobel’s surprise when she saw Seton knew her way around the crowded kitchen tables and Seton described the model kitchen at Fontainebleau, where the queen once loved to play at cookery, making candied violets and marmalades. They both loved sweets, they found – not the stiff grand confections made more to be gazed at than to be eaten, but the peaches preserved in lavender syrup, spiced fruits with all the warmth of summer still in them.

  Behind them a maid was sweating over her pestle and mortar, with a whole pile of nuts to be ground into powder. Giggling, Seton confessed that, after the first time they tried to make marchpane, her Majesty had the ingredients sent up ground already.

  She’d seen Isobel was anxious to impress her guests at the forthcoming Easter feast, when everyone could eat their fill again. To show she was filling her position properly. Seton sent her own groom riding back into Edinburgh to buy gold leaf to gild the almond castle, and to bully her Majesty’s confectioner into parting with the recipe for making sugar paste the new way, so that it could be worked more easily.

  Isobel loved to hear stories of their life in France. Of Diane de Poitiers’ chateau near to Poissy, and how the Marys used to be taken over to see her, so she could check how their education was progressing.

  How they’d be taken to her chamber, where she lay on a vast carved bed, propped up on pillows so her face would not be creased in sleep, and they’d be given squares of tapestry to sit on the floor she had sprinkled with rose petals, and essence of lily of the valley. How they’d watch, as her maids prepared the silver bathtubs in the chain of heated rooms where she would steam her skin like an oriental lady.

  Seton could tell tales of Diane’s banquets where the white wine was made cool with snow, of music in the pavilions by the river; a tennis court where the king played dressed in white silk. Of a park where special deer wore silver collars and ornamental canals were filled with fish; and of how, when the royal children came to stay, muzzled mastiffs and even a bear were brought into the nursery.

  ‘What a life you’ve had,’ Isobel said abruptly, as they watched the groom scurry away.

  Seton was taken aback – afraid her tales of the court might seem like boasting, but anyone could see Isobel meant it sincerely. And Seton was just as sincere when she answered:

  ‘No more than yours. This great household to run, a fine son and a baby.’

  She meant it, too. Convent or court; a house was the one place Seton hadn’t lived since early childhood. They’d been taught the theory of household management at Poissy, but Seton sometimes thought she pitied the man who married any of the Marys.

  Except, of course, for the advantage of their influence with the Queen’s Majesty.

  Isobel blushed with pleasure, though she shook her head, and to please her Seton told more stories, of feasts and foreign notables, of Fontainebleau and finery. But she found herself hiding some sides of court life from Isobel’s candid eye. Half, perhaps, as though she were somehow ashamed of them. Half as though Isobel were a child in need of protection, although in fact she was by several years the elder.

  *

  The weather continued to improve during the first weeks of Seton’s stay. And she remembered, somewhere in her bones, just how magical, how pregnant with sweetness, the spring of Scotland could be.

  As green came back at last to the world, she began to feel again the throb of connection with her country – with the pale bright days on the banks of the Firth, with the acid young green of heather – and the court with all its noise and its plots began to seem a whole world away. A strange, monstrous entity – a roaring beast from a childhood story.

  Even when they left the luxury of the great house for a few days and moved to Niddry – that single sharp cornered grey stone tower, uncompromising as something a child might make of toy bricks – it too felt like reality; as if the soft air and manicured forests of France were just a fantasy. Scotland – this Scotland, the rough Scotland of hills and harvests – had Seton until she was five: clearly, it still had a part of her.

  *

  Some news from the court did reach the family at Seton. George travelled back and forth, and often he and his sister rode out together side by side, so he could show her the country, with the scent of the flowers coming off the fields where beans jostled the ripening barley.

  Pleasant though it was to be on leave, as the weeks wore on Seton found herself thirsting for the tales he brought.

  When she heard the queen had sent Maitland south, to negotiate a summer meeting at York with Elizabeth of England, Seton felt she should be there, helping to make ready. But soon the news ceased to be so alluring.

  There came a day, just when the flowers were opening on the rowan, and the country people tied a sprig to their door to keep witches away, when George arrived with a frowning face, calling for the ladies.

  There had been a dispatch from France. Queen Catherine de Medici, holding the realm together for a child heir, had held out the hand of friendship to the Protestants of that country.

  That was not a policy with which Queen Mary’s Guise family would agree… and as George spoke, Seton could see in memory the hard helmeted profile of the duke, the head of the clan. She could hear the controlled, compelling tones of his brother the cardinal, who had always taken the prominent part in advising and handling Queen Mary.

  ‘The duke was riding back from the south when – near Visny, it was – he came across a party of Protestant Huguenots worshipping. His men fell upon them – “massacred them” is what John Knox will call it, and for once it’s hard to disagree. Now France is facing a civil war – and over religion.’

  Isobel began to say something soothing, about that all being a long way off, and her husband looked at her almost contemptuously. Seton felt a flash of pity for her sister-in-law – but a tinge of irritation, too, she feared, which took her aback after their earlier amity.

  ‘If you think the ripples from that stone won’t reach us across the sea, you are deceiving yourself, madam. God’s breath, but this was unnecessary! Her Majesty had already too slight an urge to try and restore the old faith to this country. Our best hope would have been to persuade her, slowly, quietly.’ He shot a glance at Seton.

  ‘Now she faces a much starker choice. Either she sides with the Guises, and sets her face against everyone she here relies on. Or else she turns to Lord James and his cronies.’

  ‘But that would mean turning her back on the rest of her family.’ Seton could feel how this would hurt her Majesty. Slowly the wraith-like figures of the court were becoming more real than the servants and the sunshine all around.

  Seton should be back at court – the queen would need her there.

  It was there that George needed her to be.

  Suddenly this quiet domestic world seemed itself shadowy, and Seton turned quickly towards her brother.

  ‘And if she fails to choose Lord James, then England…’ Seton was still busy working it out, but her brother glanced appreciatively across, as if they two alone here spoke the same language.

  ‘Yes. Oh, the meeting with Elizabeth is already off, not that we’ve been told so officially. But James Stewart and the Protestant lords are still the conduit to English f
riendship and the English succession, and that’s the prize her Majesty has set her heart on, seemingly.

  ‘To cap it all, that fool Bothwell has broken out of Edinburgh gaol. Some quarrel over a wench with the Earl of Arran,’ – he tossed Isobel the explanation – ‘and then there was Arran swearing Bothwell had made a plot to kidnap the queen and murder her brother.

  ‘Now Bothwell’s managed to flee south across the border… It’s as if everything is coming at once to make the queen cling closer to Lord James – oh, I beg his pardon, Lord Moray!’ And that, of course was why the queen had suddenly given her half-brother the earldom of Moray. If Bothwell were in disgrace, how better to show it than to pour honour on Bothwell’s intended quarry?

  Recollecting himself – glancing around the listening servants – George made a muttered apology to Isobel, and went to change his clothes after the journey.

  Thoughtfully, Seton too climbed the stone stairway to her room. Pondering how long it would take to pack, she told the nearest page to send a maid – ‘and hurry.’

  Seven

  It was, indeed, only hours later that the messenger came with the summons back to court. Balked of the longed-for York trip, the queen was still planning a journey.

  As Seton rode into the courtyard at Holyrood, the place was like an ant heap overturned. Baggage wagons being loaded up, more horses than she’d ever seen there before – and, surely, more soldiery?

  In the privy chamber she found them all on their knees, busy about the bags. But there was a tension in the air beyond any worries over the safe packing of her Majesty’s jewels, and whether the north required her furs on what might turn into an autumn journey.

  ‘They’re calling it a progress,’ Fleming murmured, ‘but we all know there’s a confrontation at the end of it. We’re going up to Aberdeen – and Inverness too if necessary. Those Gordons!’

  That was another piece of news Seton’s brother had brought home. Sir John Gordon, third of the Earl of Huntly’s nine sons, had been thrown into prison after a duel with an Ogilvy. Now he had broken out of gaol, and fled north to his father’s vast lands. As Seton murmured back to Fleming, thinking of Bothwell, the Edinburgh gaols didn’t seem too good at holding anybody.

  ‘It’s not only that.’ As Seton knelt to help Fleming lay flat a gold overskirt, Beaton had come up behind them, silently. ‘Didn’t you hear about the drawing?’

  Seton’s face must have given the answer, for Beaton went on immediately, ‘The queen was walking in the garden with the English envoy, and someone handed her a rude drawing—’ Impatient with her flat recitation, the others took up the tale.

  ‘—and no one knows whether it came from the Protestants or the Gordons – but the insult was extraordinary!’ Fleming finished. Indeed it was – but just then a rustle in the presence chamber outside told them they could no longer speak freely.

  As the others melted away, Seton was left staring pensively at the glowing golden skirt – a garment for palaces, for the queen in all her glory – and wondering if it was really going to be that sort of a journey.

  *

  It was not that sort of a journey. It was something wilder, and stranger. As the court rode north on a wet and frankly chilly August day, it seemed as if autumn had come before summer had really warmed them. The purple spikes of willowherb looked drowned, their feathery white seeds too sodden to fly, and behind the mullein, the witches’ candle, the bracken and the brakes of pinewood made a wet tapestry.

  Randolph (for where the queen went, the ambassadors went too) eyed the green corn in the fields disparagingly, and muttered that it was too late for it ever to ripen. But as they drew near to the first of the great hills, the clouds broke, spirits lifted, and even he began to take a cursory interest in the peasantry.

  Here, it was the square slabs of peat they were laying out to dry; there, an old man was shaking a bundle of weeds over his hands and arms like a mother shaking powder over a baby.

  ‘It’s meadowsweet. They rub their hands in the pollen before opening a hive. It makes the bees drowsy.’ Beaton had always been the best of them at herbs and remedies, but she volunteered information only rarely.

  Perhaps her animation came from Randolph’s presence, and he seemed to be sticking to Beaton and Seton – Livy and Fleming had ridden ahead with her Majesty, and who cared if some men looked askance, to see so many women riding not pillion, but independently? The queen for one seemed to be in her element, positively relishing each hardship of the journey.

  ‘I heard last night she said she wished she were a man, and could sleep in the fields with a sword by her side?’ Randolph himself obviously preferred a feather bed. ‘God’s life, these roads…’ His horse stumbled, and he pulled it up sharply.

  ‘Cheer up, Master Randolph! Just wait till the end of our journey in Inverness. You should find soft living there at Strathbogie! They say Lord Huntly lives better than the queen herself, and receives visitors under a velvet state canopy.’

  They all glanced further up the column, to where Lord James – Lord Moray – was now riding close beside her Majesty.

  *

  The hills loomed up on the left as they headed out of Stirling – great spits of rock, like the claws of some huge animal, embracing valleys of fertile land. The crofters in their round haystack huts made a decent enough living that they could even afford to bring gifts of fruit out to her Majesty. When, in Perth, her ladies told her how grumpy Randolph was, she sent him a plate of raspberries.

  Between Glamis and Edzell, Livy asked him teasingly whether it was really so very different when the English Queen went on progress. He answered, rather pompously, that the roads were better and the houses finer; and their owners, of course, delighted by the honour of entertaining majesty.

  ‘Is it true Queen Elizabeth’s convoy is almost ten miles long? And that she carries half her furniture in the baggage train?’

  ‘And that some of these so-honoured nobles are so horrified by the thought of the bills, they pack up and leave home if they hear she may want to stay?’ Fleming picked up the game delightedly.

  Randolph spluttered a little, but he admitted the English court on progress could manage little more than ten miles a day. The Scottish court did better than that, but all the same it was almost the end of the month before they reached Aberdeen.

  Now they were in Gordon territory.

  Lord Huntly had been told to surrender his son John to the queen’s authority, and that he was to come attended by no more than a hundred men.

  But as they rode through streets wet with the smells and dye vats of the town’s wool industry, worried-looking burghers pushed through the cheering crowds to consult with Lord Moray.

  Huntly was outside the town with fifteen hundred armed men, and though his countess was here to greet the queen, even that had the air of a parley.

  Her Majesty kept her dignity. After an uncomfortable night (the town was hardly big enough for all the newcomers, let alone the countess’ train of servants and ladies), they carried out the plans that had been made. They visited the university.

  As for Sir John – the queen told the countess calmly – there could be no talk of pardon until he had surrendered himself. But it was with a feeling of urgency that they set out again, towards Inverness.

  *

  Her Majesty seemed inspirited by the drama. Each night, as her ladies undressed her, she was brisk, though gracious; cheerful but not confiding. No hint of the tears and threats which defiance in Edinburgh had provoked in her. A war of nerves brought on a nerve storm; if it was actual war, she was ready.

  It was from others that Seton learnt Sir John and his men were haunting their road; that there were rumours the Gordons were planning to kidnap her, and even wed her to Sir John by force. He’d made some wild claims of love, as threatening in their way as open hostility.

  Needless to say, they did not stop at the earl’s castle of Strathbogie. Even Randolph hardly thought of it, by this time. There was som
ething in the very scenery – the black brimming lochs like the devil’s broth, the unfamiliar light on the hills – and the air of purpose, too, which was breeding a spirit of action in even the least hardy.

  Every night in her Majesty’s tent, they laid her favourite Turkey carpet on the floor, put out ashes of rosemary to clean her teeth and the marigold lotion for her hair. They were used to making a cocoon of comfort inside a grey forbidding castle, and this was not so different. There was even her little lapdog to be exercised, sick and grumpy from jouncing on a pageboy’s saddle all day.

  But even if she had to lie out on the heather with the common soldiers, Seton thought, I believe she really would take it cheerfully.

  One night, the queen came in aglow from a meeting with her officers. ‘It’s strange,’ she exclaimed. ‘Isn’t it silly, Seton? I look like a tramp – I’ve been wearing this mantle since we crossed the bog yesterday – but I swear I feel more like a queen up here than I do sitting at Holyrood in all my ceremony.’

  Seton did nothing more than smile sympathetically, and take the muddy cloak away. Deerskin – kept out the rain and didn’t hold water the way a sheepskin would: they should all be so lucky. But in truth she did think her mistress looked more like a queen than at Holyrood, or in France.

  Crowned in her cradle, Queen Mary couldn’t even have remembered that moment when an ordinary flesh-and-blood mortal becomes something like a divinity. Well – thought Seton, pulling her own gauntlets off her chapped hands, and absently reaching for the goose-fat salve – we all find our moments, maybe.

  *

  Queen Mary’s high spirits continued the next morning, and so did those of her ladies, though the oatcake the servants brought for breakfast – they were clearly passing out of the land of bakers – made the foreigners in the retinue mouth and grumble disgustedly. The butter was made of goat’s milk, and left a rank aftertaste on the breath.

  But the country they rode through was vivid with colour, in its wild way. The brake fern had started turning to bronze and yellow even in the time since they had left Edinburgh, and Beaton, riding alongside, pointed out to Seton a few late harebells, and bright scarlet bear-berries growing among the heather.